Uncommon chirping

There is in fact a dusk-after-rain quality to her poems

After reading “Sorting Winter Days” by Sohini Basak, I started moving around the sparse furniture in my flat, pushing the futon forward, pulling the fridge back. In the third poem of her stunning debut collection, we live in the newness of small differences (London: Eyewear Publishing, 2018), Basak describes moving around furniture from one floor to another in a house, changing the purpose of rooms: “we bring the dining table upstairs... we turn the living room into a bedroom.” Then, in a characteristic leap of narrative between the real and surreal, she writes: “we crowd old pillowcases with embroidery so